So yesterday (21st November 2012) my business partner and I took a little trip to Conway Hall, Holborn in London to attend the Content Marketing Show – which was pretty awesome. Zazzle Media were kind enough to invite us so we could eat two meals on one plate; does that work? Sure is more enjoyable than killing two birds – something we definitely didn’t do… anyway. We had a great meeting with the Zazzle team brainstorming and coming up with some quality ideas on how to take our business further and really expand on our LiveCasino.co.uk, Roulette.co.uk and LiveRoulette.co.uk brands. So that was excellent and more importantly, productive! I also saw a lot of old colleagues from several different agencies. It’s amazing how small the digital marketing world is; yet somehow still as saturated as my porn collection? Too far? I’m in a strange mood. But that’s not what I’m here to write about… So I took down a whole load of notes from the guest speakers, a few of which stood out tremendously with such a fire and confidence about them. That aside I took down valuable notes from each of the speakers and figured I’d just throw you guys just a small selection of the points I found most useful and inspiring. Some of it is so basic you’d think… obviously? but often forgotten about, or just an incredibly inspiring sentence. It’s all pretty random, make of it what you will – for me they are ideas, tips and reminders. In no particular order… Enjoy! Content Marketing Show Notes As I blank, I want to blank, in...

…like what I did there? Didn’t get it? Wooooosssshhhh… (that’s the sound of it flying right over your head). Jokes. Pissed! Let’s be honest, pissed! If like me, you’re a forward thinker, an opportunist, someone who finds a way through, grabs something by the balls and really goes for it. Then you’ll probably agree that this exact match domain update is pretty annoying. You may also be pissed off about the fact that your website, rightly or wrongly has been demoted in Google’s search results. However, if you are like me you won’t mind too much either because when your website doesn’t drop, and still succeeds, it shows you’re a badass marketer and know your shit! So What Happened To Me and My Websites? Not that much actually. In fact I’m confident the EMD update did not impact my results in the slightest. Let’s look at what the update was targeting here – let’s be reasonable is pretty much what Matt Cutts and his sly old bunch of web spam dogs are saying. The EMD update is not a penalty. The Exact Match Domain update is there to level out playing field as it were. Is it right that we stuck our necks out, emptied our pockets and more to get ourselves to best domain to give ourselves the best chance of success at making money and now Google are levelling it out? Hell no. However, are we being penalised? No. We are simply having a small portion of our advantage removed. See it as 3 steps forward 2 steps back kinda move. Does it anger me and other...

So, what with my new found interest in helping others; along with the fact that I want to turn this blog into a monster, I’m going to teach you how I built a basic but effective affiliate based website in just two days. If you already follow my blog you’ll know that I recently purchased great domain called LiverpoolAirportParking.co.uk; I’ve now turned this into a working affiliate website. This is how I did it… Just to clarify, this post does not include choosing the domain name, niche, or setting up the domain with a web host. If it turns out you need help with that too, let me know in the comments and I’ll be more than happy to help. So, here goes… Step 1 – Affiliates I’d expect this part to be carried out before spending any money on a domain name anyway, but for the sake of this blog post I’ve added it to help you guys. The first step is to find out exactly who to promote. For instance, if you’re looking to sell car insurance you may want to use a comparison website script, or alternatively you could exclusively advertise one companys’ products. There are two leading ways of doing this which includes using an affiliate network (a middle man to make life easier) or directly through the company. However to really explain this section properly I need to break it down somewhat… What is an affiliate network? An affiliate network put simply is a website set up to facilitate the communication between affiliate webmasters and brands. Signing up to an affiliate network is easy,...

So my life has been rather exciting and extremely busy lately. I’ve just arrived back from one of the most amazing experiences of my life… Thailand To keep this short and sweet, i went for just over two weeks to a beautiful island called Koh Samui in the South of Thailand. In and around the island is a whole lot of other islands too – making it a whole lot more exciting to dot around. The whole trip was one big explosion of heat, madness, culture, nature, drinking and exploring. It was amazing. One of my favourite moments was being blessed by a Monk at one of the temples. Another was exploring Anthong Marine National Park; a series of 42 protected islands. Roulette.co.uk My company, Right Casino Media, recently partnered up with the owners of roulette.co.uk to renovate, revitalize and monetize the website. With such a powerful brand name Roulette.co.uk has the potential to become one of the largest casino affiliates around. The website has been re-designed and re-structured though is nowhere near complete, it will be updated on a regular basis and constantly added too with the latest and greatest in roulette gaming. Check it out at...

Straight to the point here: Fresh Fish = Fresh Ideas On many, many nights on my laptop I’ll be searching through domain forums, affiliate forums and generally keep myself up to date and looking at domain names for sale – with the Google keywords tool open in another tab of course, need to spot that opportunity now don’t we. Anyway, I spotted a domain relating to Mother’s Day, that magical day we celebrate our mother’s aka mothering sunday. To be honest, the domain was poor, however, I was intrigued (remembering old clients heavily targeting mothers day and similar in the past) so I did a little research. I was shocked to see that the Google keywords tool reported back to me with shockingly high amount of search volume for “mothers day” and to my further surprise “mothers day 2011”. I thought, ‘ok, let me check what this is like in the month of March…What!? That Much!?’. Mothers Day Search Volume Stats I couldn’t believe it. That’s a lot of people searching for a public holiday, that’s 664,500, what are they after that’s the question? I verified this wasn’t a one off and that I hadn’t missed some sort of 2011 stunt I wasn’t aware of using Google insights. Google Insights offers trends and data spanning back to 2004 over any date period you like, it’s ace! It showed that every year “mothers day” searches were growing and so were “mothers day [year]” searches. On the image above the red line illustrates the most recent years search trend. What did I do next? Went and found that mothersday2012.co.uk was available...

About Mikey Charalambous

"Mike is probably the most talkative guy I've ever known - if he has an 'off' button, I haven't found it! Commonly referred to as 'Chara', he has an uncanny ability to talk passionately about practically any subject. His energy and positivity is infectious. Expect to see him shredding up the dance floor, particularly when Michael Jackson drops. A lover of travel, adventure and meeting new people." - A Close Friend